On a January morning in 1941, a shot rang out near a crossroads a few miles outside Nairobi, and the body of Joslyn Hay was found slumped in the footwell of his car. He had been killed by a single bullet to the head. The murder of the man known to everyone as Joss would pull back the curtain on a colony already notorious for its scandals, and at the center of it all stood the woman he had once married, Lady Idina Sackville. By the time of Joss’s death, Idina had lived more lives than most women of her era could imagine.
Born in 1893 into the upper reaches of English aristocracy, she was the daughter of Gilbert Sackville, the eighth Earl De La Warr, and Muriel Brassey, whose grandfather had amassed a fortune in railroads. The marriage had been a transaction, wealth in exchange for a title, and it collapsed when Idina was only four. Gilbert moved out, installed a cancan dancer as his mistress, and left Muriel to raise their children. When Muriel did the unthinkable and divorced him, society turned its back on the family.
Idina’s childhood friends were forbidden to see her, and she grew up on the margins of the world that should have been hers by birth. Muriel was no ordinary woman. She had grown up aboard a steam yacht, traveling the globe with her mother, who had written a travelogue translated into seventeen languages. She campaigned for women’s suffrage, hosted radicals and reformers in her drawing rooms, and did not banish her daughter after tea as other Edwardian mothers did.
Idina absorbed these conversations, shaped by politics and the mystical teachings of Theosophy. She was presented at court, but reluctantly, and arrived at society gatherings with her Pekingese dog, Satan, tucked under her arm. When no suitable suitor emerged, her mother sent her to America, and when she returned, she traded debutante balls for suffragist protests. Then she met Euan Wallace, a wealthy cavalry officer in the King’s Household Guard.
He was charming, rich beyond measure, and unconcerned with the scandals attached to her name. Within a fortnight he proposed, and by all accounts it was a genuine love match. They married in 1913, honeymooned in Egypt, and returned to London as one of the most sought-after couples in the city. But the war that began in 1914 changed everything.
Euan was wounded in Belgium and sent home, where Idina nursed him through his recovery. Two sons followed, but the marriage began to fray as Euan’s absences lengthened. Idina, unwilling to be alone, had a secret cupboard built in her bedroom with a hidden staircase leading to a room below. During one of Euan’s leaves, he met Barbara Lutyens, the daughter of the renowned architect, and became infatuated.
By 1918, when Idina fell seriously ill with influenza, pale and weakened, Euan’s attention had shifted entirely to Barbie. Idina watched as the man she loved slipped away, and she understood that the marriage was over. She turned to Charles Gordon, a charming but reckless man who spoke of East Africa with a longing she recognized. He described a land of golden plains and mist-laden hills, a place where one could live unburdened by the weight of civilization.
When Euan returned home after the armistice, Idina told him she wanted a divorce. He was stunned and pleaded with her, reminding her that she would forfeit the hundred-thousand-pound trust he had established, that she would lose her children. He told her directly that if she left, she would never see them again. She left anyway.
The divorce was finalized in March 1919, and within a week she had married Charles and set sail for Kenya. They arrived with nothing but their names and a claim in a government land raffle designed to attract European settlers. Charles, an excellent marksman, met the requirement for firearm proficiency, and the couple was awarded two hundred acres in the highlands at the edge of the Aberdares, overlooking the Rift Valley. When Idina saw it for the first time, she felt something she had never felt before, a sense of belonging.
The land was vast and golden, softened by rolling mists. She understood in that moment that this place would become her greatest love affair. They built a house called Slains, after Joss’s ancestral castle, and filled it with remnants of their old lives. The parties became legendary.
Guests arrived after grueling drives to find silk pajamas and a bottle of whiskey awaiting them. Idina received them in a green onyx bath, cigarette holder in hand, and as the night deepened, she produced a set of bedroom keys. Fate dictated the night’s pairings. No one slept alone unless they wished to.
But the marriage to Charles had already begun to crack. He was too idle, too content, and Idina was never still. After ten months, she returned to England hoping to reconnect with Euan, only to find that he was engaged. To Barbie.
Heartbroken, she went back to Kenya, but the marriage could not be saved. She divorced Charles and, in 1923, married Joss Hay, a twenty-two-year-old aristocrat with charm, a title in his future, and no fortune to his name. They returned to Kenya, leased a two-thousand-acre estate, and built another life. Idina took farming seriously, walking barefoot through the fields in a man’s shirt and trousers, scandalizing the older settlers.
To the younger generation, she was something else entirely. Slains became the heart of a new and thrilling world, a place where the rules of London ceased to matter. Joss, however, was never faithful, and Idina did not expect him to be. His lovers came and went, and through it all, Idina found an unlikely friend in Alice de Janzé, an American heiress who was also involved with Joss.
The two women became close, waiting together for Joss to tire of his latest infatuation. But when Joss fell for Molly Ramsay Hill, a woman of mysterious past and considerable allowance, the balance shifted. By 1928, the newspapers had begun calling Kenya’s expatriate elite Happy Valley, a place where marriages were fluid and decadence was the rule. When Sirill Ramsay Hill left the country, he asked Joss to watch over Molly.
Joss took the request to heart and never came home. When Sirill learned of their departure, he drove through the night and intercepted the couple’s train in Nairobi. He did not fire the pistol he carried. Instead, he whipped Joss across the face in front of the entire station and walked away.
Idina lost Joss, lost Alice, lost the world she had built. By 1929, the bank foreclosed on Slains, and her divorce was finalized within the year. She returned to London, then married for a fourth time, to Donald Honeyman, a white hunter who adored her too much. His possessiveness suffocated her, and the marriage fell apart.
It was during this period that she reconnected with her eldest son, David, whom she had not seen in fifteen years. She had no right to her sons under the terms of her first divorce; Barbie Wallace was their mother in every legal sense. David reached out to her in 1934, and they met at Claridge’s. The reunion lasted only days before Barbie intervened and David, shaken, promised never to see Idina again.
She left rather than fight. She had always left when she could not win. In 1939, she married for the fifth time. Vincent Soltau, a pilot whose resemblance to Euan was impossible to ignore, had two young children and had joined the Royal Air Force as war approached.
For a brief moment, Idina’s life felt whole. Then the war came, and with it, the losses that would finally break her. Joss, now widowed and serving in the Kenyan Reserve Regiment, was murdered in 1941. Euan died the same year.
Alice, acquitted of shooting her lover in Paris years earlier, lay down with a gun and ended her own life. Then, in 1943, Idina’s younger son, Gerard, whom she had only just found again after twenty-five years, was killed during a military training exercise. A year later, almost to the day, David was killed by machine-gun fire in Greece. Idina collapsed and spent a week in isolation.
The grief became physical. She developed neuritis, then a nervous breakdown. The doctor warned her to leave Clouds, the home she had built on the slopes of Mount Kinangop, and descend to sea level for her health. She returned to England too late.
Diana, her daughter, had built a life without her and refused to see her, embarrassed by the stories attached to her mother’s name. It was not until 1950 that her brother orchestrated a reunion, and against all odds, Idina won her daughter back. She asked Diana to name her next child Euan, in memory of the first husband she had loved before everything fell apart, the man whose photograph had remained beside her bed through every passion and every loss. Diana agreed and kept her promise, but the planned visit to Kenya kept being postponed.
The Mau Mau uprising delayed it, and then Idina fell ill. Cancer had spread through her body, and there was nothing to be done. She died in September 1955, at the age of sixty-two, with Euan’s pearl ring still on her finger. She was buried beneath the stone she had raised for Gerard, her final resting place entwined with the grief she had never outrun.
Diana never made it to Clouds. The visit was postponed one last time, and then it was too late. The house stood silent, its doors left ajar, the flowers untended beneath the African sun.
Idina had never wished to be an old woman, and by dying at sixty-two, she had gotten her wish.
